Author of "Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat," on the science of taste, culinary history, and the future of food. My work has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, Wired, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, the Guardian and the Huffington Post. In a previous life I was a reporter for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, where I contributed to several Pulitzer Prize-winning efforts. I am the co-author of "Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms."

Romney's Rising Oceans Joke

Just a quick note on one part of Mitt Romney’s big speech. He didn’t simply dismiss global warming, or reject policies intended to address or mitigate against sea level rise, which is closely tied to global warming. Politicians do those things all the time. It’s ill-informed and irresponsible. But Romney took this a step further: he used the very idea of controlling sea level rise as a mere rhetorical device, a laugh line to mock Barack Obama‘s grandiosity. And he milked it for a few long seconds as the crowd at the Republican National Convention laughed.

“President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

I don’t buy that this is solely about Obama’s alleged hubris. It’s a twofer: of course the crowd was laughing at the hubris angle; while I don’t have a poll to prove it, it’s safe to say most RNC attendees are not too keen on the current consensus on climate science either. So: double rimshot. But this remark is, needless to say, unhelpful. Sea level rise is a genuine problem. The oceans are actually rising as the planet warms up, in part because the volume of water is expanding due to the extra heat, and in part due to the ongoing melting of polar ice. Evidence suggests that for most of the past 3,000 years, sea levels were stable, but that they began rising in the 1950s. Since then, they crept up at an annual rate of 1.7 millimeters per year. Lately, though, sea level rise has apparently been accelerating: This 2010 paper published by Science magazine (paywalled), notes that over the past 20 years, global sea level has risen an average of 3.3 millimeters a year.

This is becoming a severe social and political problem because so many people around the world, and millions of them in the United States (including Romney’s Boston headquarters) are located along coastlines. Approximately 10% of the world’s population lives at elevations of 10 meters or less above sea level, the Science paper notes, and many of these places suffer from subsidence, erosion, and other problems that hasten their exposure and possible demise.

The biggest risk here is from storms, which can suddenly pump up sea levels by many meters, with little warning. People like living near coastlines, and, in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world, coastal development has surged in recent years. But most assumptions for development and flood protection assume a certain stability that no longer exists. Denying this (as some state and local governments are doing) is crazy: sooner or later, the people living in these places, and the businesses they built there, will pay the price.

So Romney’s notion that helping families and protecting communities against sea level rise are somehow diametrically opposed is silly. He knows better.

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Compare the last 50 years of temperature and carbon rise in our atmosphere to the last 20,000. And our economy as well as our scientific advances will progress with the use of renewable energy. It lasts forever! We are so far behind because of the misconceptions about the science paid for by the nonrenewable energy companies. Wake up.

Yes, climatologists are doing that…..really? Perhaps it is that humans produce over 90 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day and naturally occurring sources (volcanoes, etc.) total less than .05 per day. It doesn’t take a bright person, even an American, to understand that this is anthropogenic and every single national academy of science (respectable groups of scientists) from every major nation in the entire planet believe this is the case…that it is human caused. There are no respectable groups of scientists that do not believe that humans are causing this problem.

Would NASA be the band of loons that keeps James Hansen on the payroll? And is entirely funded by government and substantially dependent on creating controversial (and imaginary) hobgoblins to “research”? That NASA?

@William Licopoli, very well put. It is really amazing that in 2012, anyone could consider this a left wing conspiracy. If you believe the age-old line, “follow the money”, you have to see that the money is in extracting and using the fossil fuels that create greenhouse gasses, not in research grants. That’s where the motivation to conspire lies. Follow the money.

Not to be rude, but you’re completely wrong. 97% of scientists agree that we’re at or beyond our climate tipping point and it’s only going to get worse. I used to have my doubts too but I’ve read the best books on both sides of the argument and the climate change material is indisputable. Please read the following – we should all be scared:

There is always a forcing – a cause for past and present changes in the earth’s climate. Scientists have determined the forcings for past climate events and have determined that CO2 is the primary cause of the current climate warming. We are now capable of sampling the CO2 fingerprint in the atmosphere and determining whether it was put there by natural causes or by the burning of fossil fuels.

The results are in – it’s us. We’re causing it. And we’re making it significantly worse every day.

The economic trauma required to switch to clean energy will be minor compared to impact of the desertification of the US and Europe.

Yes; global warming is occurring, and at an increasing rate. Sea rises, droughts, more extreme weather, and loss of habitable land (in the near term, certain islands) are all related problems. We have a limited window of opportunity to correct that. Someone who doesn’t understand this fundamental problem, given all this evidence, is either pandering to a particular audience, or ignorant, willfully and alarmingly ignorant. ….. could be President Romney.